There was the Year That Hazmat Was on my Street Three Times (2002). Twice confirmed meth labs.
Most of the labs are gone now, and many of the nefarious neighbor activities with them. But we had slews of assaults, burglaries, grand theft, etc. etc. in the neighborhood for years, and rumors of worse. Most of the problems nowadays are with folks that move to the country and think that are either 1. newbs that think “country living” means they can let their dogs run loose in a place where some people still depend on livestock or 2. uppity mortgage refugees trying to re-model the community on their ideals.
There is a lovely brick tudor down the block that the swat team surrounded once. It was empty and sealed with police tape for a year. There are new people in it now, who seem fine.
We have always speculated that our next door neighbors are in the witness protection program. In the 10 years we’ve lived here, we’ve seen the two boys in the yard six or seven times. We’ve met the parents once, but they were in a big hurry to leave, so it was a very short meeting. They mow their lawn three times a summer, whether it needs it or not. We found out two years ago that they have two other children. Both girls, one is maybe 20 now, the other is about 6. As far as I know, they only go out at night.
There used to be a KFC a few blocks away that tended to get orders wrong. I once got a bag of raw chicken. Then one night we passed it coming home late to see a haz-mat team in level As cleaning it out. :eek: Seems the manager had a meth lab in the kitchen.
The first apartment I ever lived in (not too long ago mind you, just 2004,) was a little place in a small mountain town in NY. The apartment was above the landlord’s apartment in the same building. One day a few weeks after moving there I get a knock at my door. I open it, and it’s some random looking guy in a suit. He shows me a badge and says,
“I’m a federal officer, is [landlord’s name] here?”
I say no, she live downstairs. He goes:
“Oh. Well, do you know [different person with same last name as landlord, possibly her daughter.]”
“No.”
“Ok, well, if she comes by or you hear anything about her let me know” and then leaves.
He never left a card for me to call him or even told me his name, and I never got a long look at the badge to see what agency he worked for, or if it was even real for that matter. Just a very surreal experience and I don’t want to know what my landlord or her daughter would be doing to warrant either a real federal agent or a fake one to come looking for them.
Heh! That happened in my first home. My next door neighbor(s) had way too many people over for Labor Day. They monopolized the town-home community parking lot. 12 adult people in a two bedroom TH? For FOUR DAYS? Definitely odd. :dubious:
Anyway, one evening I got home from work and the Seminole Co Sheriff’s arrest team was camped out in the parking lot and intercepted me. I had to wait until they arrested her and took her away before I could enter my home.
We had an all male brothel in the basement unit below us.
They weren’t hiding anything, I found all their used condoms in our recycling bin one morning. The floors were poorly insulated and the lads seemed to be competing for an Emmy. Later, having a smoke on the porch, we’d hear the customers rating the boys and pissing in our garden before they drove away, poorer but satisfied.
I used to work at a group home… and the neighbors dealt out of the side of their house. My office (For the short stint that I was the Director) was in the basement with, unbeknownst to them, a little window with a direct view of their side door. It was just in a little dug in nook about a foot below the ground from the outside… I don’t think they ever thought anything of it.
Anyway, I used to watch this happen day in and day out. Until they started to come under surveillance from the police. Then the people would call from the Mini-Mart on the corner… and the neighbors would head out and meet them at some determined location. Not nearly as interesting to watch.
I also suspect my current neighbors may be cooking up meth, but I can’t really back that up except for the occasional “cat urine” smell. And it’s not really consistent.
I almost forgot… at some apartments… apparantly the downstairs neighbor was actually using the apartment as some sort of love nest. I was watching TV one day, when I start hearing some yelling… I go out to see whats going on and his wife is down there pounding on the door… “RAY- I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE RAY! I KNOW YOU GOT A WOMAN IN THERE!” This went on for awhile until she went to her car and came back with a little club, and started pounding away on his truck. Ray, then, emerged from the love shack to settle her down. At least he had an apartment to move into after he got kicked out.
I used to live in the Ocean View district in San Francisco in the early 90s. At that time, the park was pretty much Drug Dealer Central every night. There was a house fire just down the street once, complete with weird colored flames and small, muffled explosions. It was a crack house.
My move fron San Leandro to Dublin was motivated by a string of vandalism incidents. The house across the street was tagged, my car side mirror was broken off, my garden hose was cut through. Noisy, drunken/stoned assholes also started wandering down the street late at night on a regular basis.
Now, the only complaints I have are the kids who run around the apartment parking lot, and the neighbor’s teenage daughter who as near as I can tell likes to crank up the volume on some shitty rap music while her boyfriend bangs her in her parents’ bed when they aren’t home. I mean, I only have audio evidence, but it is of sufficient volume to breach my wall.
Back in my university days I lived with my roommates in an area known as the student ghetto. Our original neighbor moved out and the new neighbors seemed to have a lot of cars pulling up to their place late at night. They also had a tendency to stand around in their yard in the daytime loudly announcing “I’m a pimp; she’s a ho!” Due to their bragging about their criminal tendencies everyone, including the law, knew what was up and the place was under police surveillance.
Another neighbor heard a nasty argument at their place and warned us that there would probably be a shooting. A few weeks later I went to a concert, came home exhausted, and fell asleep. When I woke up I soon noticed that it was very quiet at the neighbors’ house, so I asked one of my roommates where they’d gone.
Turned out someone had been shot there the night before. The police had come and arrested everyone they could find except for the shooting victim, who had managed to run off. I’d been so tired I slept through all the commotion.
I live in the nefarious neighbours’ house, actually.
When The Boy and I moved into our new home last year, all we knew based on the title search is that it had been bought for cheap by a contractor who flipped it and sold it to us, and that previously it had been in the same family for well over 25 years.
What title search fails to turn up is that the last member of the family to live there shacked up with a heroin dealer, who promptly started using the house as a shooting gallery (aka a crack house, only for heroin). This went on for a couple of years, during which the enterprising couple even set up a tent in the backyard to expand their burgeoning business. By the time the SWAT team got around to busting the place, they dragged out so many junkies that they needed two paddy wagons to haul them away.
Did I mention that we live in a distinctly middle to upper-middle class area? With million dollar homes just around the corner? Yeah.
It certainly explains why our back screen door is all mashed in, and why all the neighbours were giving us the gimlet eye when we moved in. We’ve happily explained that we’re just not into the hard stuff like that… but to ignore any strange-looking leafy plants in the yard.
We had a nice youngish quiet neighbor couple. The wife was into gardening and occasionally brought over vegetables or baked goods. Then she just seemed to vanish. The husband got very interested in the garden, at least to the point of digging it out and covering it with dirt.
It kinda reminded me of Rear Window, though I’m sure there was a perfectly innocent explanation.
Where I lived in South Dakota, we had nice quiet neighbors too. They occasionally would carry unconscious people into the house and we’d see animal skulls in the yard. The neighbor on the other side (also a nice quiet fella) used to go down to the river and collect large snakes to release into his yard (to keep the rodents down).
Timely thread for me, we’re trying to sell our house and can’t because of the street we live on. Directly across the street from our home (wanna see it? Here it is) sits a lovely pinkish-colored 18 unit apartment building. Many of the folks living there are perfectly fine, and then you have the five units chuck-full of redneck white trash Eminem worshippers who are visited by the police every couple of weeks, not including the regular surveillance on their leader’s apartment, out of which he is apparently dealing a copious amount of meth and pot.
Of the 39 appointments made to see our house, 18 of them have cancelled as soon as they drove down the street and saw the place across the street, along w its motley collection of $800 cars with $1600 audio systems. During our second open house a party broke out over there when one of the particularly inept idiots made bail and came home.
Then there’s the sex offender who lives in the duplex next door to the apartments, convicted some time ago of child molestation in the 1st degree , a class-B felony. The first person who actually liked the house well enough to schedule a second visit found out about that (I knew he lived there, I never see him nor have had any trouble with him at all) and decided her and her three kids would look elsewhere. Can’t say I really blame them.
And of course there’s the swingers next door.
No wonder it took 26 years, that must have been one hell of job turning a victorian into a ranch! Just kidding…
When in college I used to live in an apartment next to a “Social Club” which was essentially a private bar. I think the only requirement to join the club was that you had be be a real doucebag. I saw all kinds illegal activity going on from that place like people smoking dope and snorting coke in the driveway to my building. Once a guy in a pickup burned rubber in front of the place for so long that the entire neighborhood was filled with nasty white smoke for several minutes.
The weirdest episode was a fight that spilled out onto the street in front of the place one night. The bartender chased some guy out of the place with a golf club. They guy ran about a block away so the bartender went over to his car and started smashing out his headlights with the golf club. The other guy came back and they squared off in the middle of the street, but nobody connected - they just kept circling each other with a only one or two punches thrown that didn’t connect. An 18 wheeler was coming down the street and didn’t see them until it was almost too late. It hit the bar patron guy as it was coming to a stop and knocked him on his ass. He got up and ran away and the bartender grabbed his golf club and went back into the bar. The truck driver got out and walked around a little, probably trying to figure out what the hell just happened. He got back in a drove off. The other guy came back a few seconds later and drove off in his car with no lights, and by the time the police showed up, it was quiet again.
Wow, nice looking house, seriously nice price … pity we are locked into connecticut. I lived on 13th Bay St in Norfolk VA. Remember the sailor in norfolk va that murdered his girlfriend and left her body in the bath tub for like a month? His apartment looked out over where my half of the duplex was…the house next to ours was dwelled in a group of people that had a best blow job contest [that is what it sounded like, one guy claimed his bitch gave the best blow jobs, the other guy didnt believe him and it sounded like from teh very loud discussion that a demonstration <and probably penis> ensued.] Across the street was a house containing a bunch of Pagans. The biker gang type. They liked selling drugs, renting out their women and randomly shooting out transformers and putting the electricity in the street out.
We live on a small horse ranch. The 100 acres to the south is planted pine woods. The front of our property has the pastures and barns, as well as a house where my horse trainer lived at the time. Our house is at the back of the property, hidden from the road by some woods that tie into the property next door.
One day, Anne (the trainer) and I were at the barn, doing horsey stuff. We noticed a helicopter flying low overhead, circling round and round. As it got closer, we could tell it was a sheriff’s copter. They were so low to the ground that we could clearly see the deputies (the copter door was open). They just looked at us and kept circling around. We kept doing our barn stuff, although we were beginning to get a bit suspicious.
After a bit, Anne went to her house, only to find a message from another neighbor that the police were conducting a manhunt on the wooded property next door. :eek: Why the cops didn’t make any attempt to notify us, I’ll never figure out (there were cops on the ground as well). I had gone back to my house, which had been unlocked and empty and adjacent to the woods where the perp was hiding. I bailed out of the house and sat outside in my truck as soon as I found out what was happening.
We were renting a townhouse in Fairfax, VA. One day the neighbors asked us if we wanted to buy some of their stuff. They were having sort of a yard sale, but wanted to sell some of the stuff in the house as well. We gave them $100 and got two dressers, some other furniture, and many boxes of “stuff” which ranged from clothing to office supplies. In all it was a very good deal for us.
A couple of days later there was a knock at the door. It was the FBI. They wanted to know what we knew about the neighbors. I have no idea why the FBI wanted them, but apparently a day or so after we bought their crap, they disappeared in the middle of the night to god-knows-where. :eek:
My neighbor has recently nailed a cardboard sign to the side of her garage, I assume for our benefit, since it’s not visible from the street and the only way to see it is to walk out our kitchen door and look towards her house. It says, “STAY OFF MY PROPERTY STAY AWAY FROM MY HOUSE DON’T TOUCH MY GARAGE THE GOOD LORD IS WATCHING YOU.”
This sign replaces the sign that was hanging there since before we bought the house, which expressed the same sentiment only without the threat of voyeuristic deities.
I have no idea why she thinks it’s necessary, because we never go anywhere near her house, garage, or property. We don’t make noise, we don’t own a stereo or a barking dog, we never have people over - we’re the ideal neighbors. It baffles me.
That reminds me of my crazy ex-stepmother. She really needed to be on some meds, and had an irrational burning hatred of my mom. One time she painted a large banner and hung it on the school fence across the street, so that my mom would see it when she came to pick me up for the weekend. It said, in large red letters, “SALLY* IS A SOCIOPATH”, followed with some incoherent justification that I don’t really remember. Apparently there was another Sally who lived nearby, who I guess the Stepbitch didn’t like either and was pleased at the side effect of pissing her off. My mom blew it off as pointless, insane ranting, which it was.
